CompUSA to close all of its 103 stores — The consumer electronics store will run store-closing sales during the holidays to get rid of inventory. — DALLAS (AP) — Consumer electronics retailer CompUSA said Friday it will close its stores after the holidays following sale of the company …

Facebook Members Sell Their Own Ads — More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages-despite the social networking site's rule against such ads. — They are posting them with the help of a Montreal-based company called Weblo …

Rails 2.0 — Rails 2.0 is finally finished after about a year in the making. This is a fantastic release that's absolutely stuffed with great new features, loads of fixes, and an incredible amount of polish. We've even taken a fair bit of cruft out to make the whole package more coherent and lean.

Ruby on Rails 2.0 released for Web apps — San Francisco - Version 2.0 of Ruby on Rails, the popular open source Web application development framework, was released this morning, said the developer of the framework, David Heinemeier Hansson, on Friday. — Key to this release is its reliance on REST …

Verizon Sued Over GPL Code In Its FiOS Router — The Software Freedom Law Center is taking issue with the Actiontec MI424WR wireless router, which may include open license-infringing BusyBox software. — The Software Freedom Law Center on Friday filed suit against Verizon …

Verizon hit with GPL copyright lawsuit over router software — Open source software is very attractive for companies looking to expand their services or quickly get new offerings to market, in part because it's free. Unfortunately, some companies tend to overlook the software license commonly attached …

First Passport, now fraud: ex-MS employee charged — The former Microsoft employee associated with the company's notorious December 1999 Hotmail outage has been charged with fraud. — Carolyn Gudmundson was indicted Thursday on charges that she raked in more than $1 million during …

Mark Zuckerberg cashes out [Scoop] — Venture capital's ancien régime has been overturned. We hear Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook, has cashed out — before an IPO, before a sale, and before his investors. In the company's recent financing round, insiders believe, he sold about $40 million worth of stock.

Hackers Launch Major Attack on US Military Labs — Hackers have succeeded in breaking into the computer systems of two of the U.S.' most important science labs, the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Los Alamos National Laboratory. — John E. Dunn, Techworld — Recommend this story?

Kindling — When I started writing this column in the spring of 1997 Apple was on the skids. It was the era of Gil Amelio, still several months before the return of Steve Jobs. Apple's products were a confused mish-mash, with product planning coming more from CompUSA than from Cupertino.

Pass The Bong, It's Another Whacky Zune Commercial — We first covered the rather different advertising campaign for Microsoft's iPod wannabe MP3 player the Zune in November. Enamored perhaps by the surrealism presented in the original campaign, Microsoft has sponsored a project called Zune-Arts …

Who should Apple buy? — Just three days ago, American Technology Research upgraded projections for Apple for the holiday quarter, suggesting as many as 2.3 million Macs and 25 million iPods would be sold. Today, AppleInsider has a research note from Andrew Neff of Bear Sterns suggesting Apple's inventory …

Novell, Red Hat and Gartner war with Facebook for PR flop award — Save the fear leader. Save the hurled — Radio Reg Is there a PR professional decent enough to join the Open Season crew? Like you, we thought "no." But, as it turns out, Lonn Johnston from Page One PR is all class and just as full of vitriol as the rest of us.

Sun guru foresees data center disaster in '08 — One of the top engineers at Sun Microsystems this week predicted that a large data center would suffer a "massive failure" during the next twelve months, causing "major national effects," including possible "national security issues," …